A Client/Server Message Oriented Middleware for Mobile Robots

Abstract

Mobile robots offer a wide range of applications in educational and research fields. Sensing, planning, control, reasoning, and learning are human-like capabilities that can be artificially replicated in a computer-based robotic system as software applications. The development of software for mobile robot application is a complex task due to the fact that the wide range of robots are composed of heterogeneous hardware components which need different device software drivers and different low-level communication protocols. This paper presents a Client/Server Message Oriented Middle for Mobile Robots which separates the user application from the hardware and low-level implementation. The middleware has been already ported to two different robotic platforms. As a case study, a path planning and self-localization algorithms have been implemented and applied successfully.